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A healthy scaleable IT solution
Hertfordshire Health Informatics Service (HHIS) manages the IT systems for two NHS Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and Hertfordshire Partnership Trust. When eight PCTs were merged into a single management structure, HHIS needed to consolidate the existing hardware to create a more manageable and scalable infrastructure.
The healthcare industry is using IT to provide a more complete and personalised service. Across the UK, healthcare providers have launched programmes to embed networked solutions within the heart of operations. Right now, the UK National Health Service (NHS) is spending £6.2 billion to enable new and more efficient IT services.
Hertfordshire Health Informatics Service (HHIS) is at the forefront of delivering these programmes. HHIS’ customers are the two Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) of Hertfordshire and the Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Mental Health Trust (HPT).
Established in 2001, HHIS has developed its services year-on-year to meet the new demands of the ever-changing NHS. In order to offer effective support to PCTs, HHIS needs a reliable IT infrastructure that can scale with customers’ demands without impacting running costs.
“Each PCT had its own file and email servers with different domains, running older versions of Microsoft Exchange server and Windows NT4,” said Martin Wallis, Head of IT Services at HHIS. “It made no sense to manage all of those separately, so when the PCTs were merged we took that opportunity to replace the older operating systems with the latest versions and upgrade the hardware that supported them.”
Choosing the right technology partner to deliver IT change
After examining possible server and storage technologies, HHIS turned to Dell. Wallis was already familiar with Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers and EMC SAN’S, having installed them during a previous project for another NHS shared services provider.
“When the decision to upgrade the hardware was made, I used the work I’d done before to show that Dell was the best option,” he commented. “The single point of contact made procuring the servers and storage very straightforward. Working with Dell meant we could design, procure and implement the entire solution from servers to software with a single partner.”
The implementation was split in two, with West Hertfordshire PCT first to move to the new hardware infrastructure. North and East Hertfordshire PCT followed shortly afterwards. HHIS implemented a Dell | EMC CX300 storage area network (SAN) to act as a centralised store for the PCTs email archive. Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers were also installed to run Microsoft Windows Enterprise Server 2003 and Microsoft Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition. During deployment, HHIS and Dell technicians worked together to perform a data centre survey, examining, among other things how much weight the floor could support, cooling requirements and power usage. Wallis added, “That survey gave us peace of mind that we hadn’t overloaded the floor and as a result we upgraded the power.”
Scalable, robust email infrastructure
HHIS has created a scalable email and collaboration tool with ample capacity to efficiently manage further growth as users numbers increase. Microsoft Exchange Server offers enhanced disaster recovery, allowing administrators to bring the server online quicker. This is done by allowing the server to send and receive mail while the message stores are being recovered from backup. Allowing constant access to email, which is used as a critical planning and collaborative tool.
The Exchange servers are in an Active/Active/Passive three-node cluster offering performance by utilising two active nodes, and resilience with the Passive node offering automated failover. Choosing Windows Clustering will also allow Exchange to scale by simply adding another node to the cluster. So, the three node cluster effectively becomes a four node cluster.
As the clustering technology is based on Blade servers this can be as simple as slotting in a new blade server and configuring it into the Exchange cluster. And since the storage is centrally managed on the SAN, any increasing storage requirements for email archives can be addressed by presenting more capacity from the SAN.
“With blades connected to a SAN it’s very easy to add disk space quickly, that was certainly a big driver”, said Wallis. “Blades also position us for future projects. For example, we want to introduce virtualisation and Dell collaborates with VMWare, so we know that combination will work well.”
SAN ensures ample storage and fast retrieval of critical data
HHIS’ previous storage consisted of a 700 gigabyte (GB) network attached storage (NAS) device and direct attached storage (DAS) devices on each server. The decision was made to centralise storage on a Dell | EMC CX300 SAN with 6.384 TB of storage. This provides HHIS with ample capacity for its email archive and will shortly store data from the HPTs’ Thomson Micromedex CareNotes patient record system.
Concluding Wallis said, “Its still unclear how various regulations will affect storage and how far back data must go. But it’s better to store all emails in one place with a searchable archive than trying to find and restore the right backup tape. The speed of retrieval is an important factor and will help us meet our obligations under the Freedom of Information Act.”
To ensure the email archive is fully protected, HHIS takes its data from disk and writes it to tape. Dell PowerVault tape libraries provide a cost-effective automated backup solution for HHIS’ consolidated SAN storage environment.
